What is Sibilance?

Sibilance refers to overly accentuated frequencies in the human voice typically between 5-10 kHz. The overly accentuated sound of S’s, Sh’s, T’s, Z’s, etc. can be extremely harsh, annoying and even painful.

NOTE: Each individual human voice is different — some individuals naturally have harsh sibilance while others don’t, and of course every shade in between.

NOTE 2: Particular microphones can exacerbate the sibilance of particular individuals, but it’s NOT solely due to any particular microphones, it’s due to the COMBINATION of a particular persons voice being recorded through a particular microphone. The combination of the frequency curve of a particular person’s voice being captured through the frequency curve of a particular microphone creates a unique resulting sound.

How to remove harsh sibilance from audio? Use a de-esser, but don’t overdo it because the resulting audio will sound like the person has a lisp! You don’t want to remove too much clarity from the sound, you just want to tame those sharp, painful frequencies.

Good de-essers:

• Scheps Omni Channel Plugin from Waves — an excellent channel strip plugin that actually has 2 de-essers built-in!
• soothe2 — My favorite de-esser; it’s a huge step up from traditional de-essers.
• Fabfilter Pro-DS — My favorite traditional de-esser; an amazing de-esser.

If a person’s recorded voice has extreme sibilance I will often use two de-essers in series 😉

How do you handle sibilance? Comment below!

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